Thomas M. Turner's Tech Ramblings  

I’m not fond of Dell’s Windows installations and since we have a Microsoft Campus Agreement, I prefer to just wipe the systems and put a clean copy of NT on them.  For some reason, though, a new Dimension 9100 model gave me fits.  It hung up during the “installing devices” part of the XPsp2 install, which led me to Microsoft KB article 828267.

Unfortunately, although a reboot did get it to continue the install and get past whatever the problem device was, it did some crazy thing where it apparently automatically set the computer name, administrator password, and even set the default user password.  The end result was, after XPsp2 was installed, I couldn’t login to the system.  The closest Microsoft KB article I could find about that was article 318026, but I couldn’t find a password in the file it said to look in.

So, I tried a clean install again, but this time I first disabled the Intel Pro/100 LOM from the BIOS menu.  The XPsp2 setup then worked as expected.

Posted by Tom at 8:56 PM